The Russians have recently developed a very advanced method of archiving important documents that has a high degree of security and is expected to last at least 100 years. In fact, they believe it is virtually impossible to hack.

We took so many photos that the camera's memory was crowded, had to copy the data in external harddisk. But when I travelled across countries, something happened to the hard disk and no photos are accessible. Luckily had uploaded few to facebook. Was using flickr and picasa earlier but I guess sharing photos on so many sites is quite difficult. Facebook is going well as all friends and family are there.

The simplest solution to tackle this photo mess, is to open a Free 1 TB flickr account. Upload all the photos based on date/time/month tag.

Wait for someone to implment a face recognition function in flickr ( iPhoto already have this). Then once you tag one person, you can find all the other photos of the same person ( as decided by the algorithm) automatically

I know one person who use to print quite a few pictures but now has a digital camera, takes pictures, but does nothing with them. I enjoyed seeing the printed pictures. Now I don't get to see anything! Fuji may be on to something. I use to enjoy getting the prints back and then even going the futher step of making enlargements of those frames I really liked. Was there delay in the process? Yes, but anticipation can be half the fun.

An old friend of mine made ther transition from film to digital. When he shot film, he was painfully aware of constraints. Film cost. Processing cost. And he had only so many shots per reel, so he spent time up front framing and composing shots before he clicked the shutter to make every shot count.

With digital, he didn't care about film or processing, and he could shoot and shoot and shoot. But while he didn't have up front costs, he had back end costs in terms of time. He had to dump all of those images from his camera to a PC, review them decide which were keepers, and load some of the ones he did keep into an image editor to crop and color correct, I told him to remember the skills he applied shooting film, and take the time before clicking the shutter to get it right, to reduce the post-processing time required.

A friend of mine is a former graphic designer and art director who now makes his living doing photo restoration. People bring him old battered print, and he scans them, imports to Photoshop, and does restorations. He reports people crying in joy when they see the results, as that old battered print might be the only image they had of a beloved late relative. I've seen a few of the before and afters, and deeply admired his skill, as he often didn't have a lot to work with,

thank you Junko...I was afraid that was the answer...that means that Facebook can take my pictures and sell them to you (not that you would want to buy them, they are not that interesting ;-)...interesting arrangement!

People were more careful while taking pictures with the old technology analog cameras - because you could not review your picture till you got it in print and the print was costly and would be only taken when the complete role was developed.

The pictures taken with those technologies are still preserved in those precious albums and serve as reminders of sweet memories of the past.

With new digital techniques and high resolution automatic cameras built into the mobile phones, picture taking is no more a skill or art or something precious. Hundreds of pictures are clicked everyday by everyday and many of them are just forgotten after clicking . With cheap storage available nobody bothers much to classify, arrange, remove unwanted pictures. So all these pictures are just lying idle in some remote servers occupying huge storage space for years.

Companies like Facebook need to have policies to force housekeeping of such storage by the users otherwise the whole thing will become unmanageable someday.